Cultist Squad

"We are Chaos!! Chaos is strong!!"

The forces of Chaos are varied, as the Chaos Gods have many, many servants. Among these are traitorous humans - mercenaries, pirates, and assorted scum - who flock to the banners of a Black Crusade in hopes of currying favor from their Chaotic patrons. Some are motivated by religious fervor, others by the promise of wealth, power, or prestige.

As the servants (workhorses) of the Chaos army, Cultists are cheap, numerous, and expendable. They are also weak and of little use other then being a meat shield and a distractor. Cultists can, however, be trained for specialist tasks like infiltration or detection.

Charge Bonus: even before Furious Charge, once within 15 range of their target when on Assault stance, Cultists gain a +50% movement bonus to their current base speed, enabling them to quickly close the distance with other units to enter melee. This bonus stacks with the +20% base movement speed bonus Furious Charge offers if it has been researched.

Tactics

Cultists are cheap and relatively lackluster, but overall necessary parts of every Chaos army. It's invariably better to spend the 80 requisition required to produce a Cultist Squad than to lose a valuable vehicle, such as a Chaos Predator to cloaked TauStealth Teams or stealthy Ork Tankbustaz. However, Cultists have to be trained in the art of detection, a minor setback, but a necessary one nonetheless. Be sure to reinforce them constantly as they die rather easily in combat. Also, due to a reinforce modifier, Cultists reinforce three times faster outside of combat than in combat.

Cultist weapon upgrades can be the difference between life or death on the field. The plasma gun can give the Chaos army the edge vs a heavy infantry army, and is far stronger than the Grenade Launcher damage-wise. However, many Chaos users find the grenade launcher to be the better weapon of the two. The grenade launcher, while weaker in general, is a long range weapon and allows the Cultist Squad to fire away safely from behind lines of Chaos Space Marines. In this position Cultists are still able to detect cloaked units and will be further removed from enemy fire. The second advantage the grenade launcher confers is the ability to knock down, scatter, and disrupt infantry who are firing on the Chaos army, thus serving as excellent supporting fire for the Chaos Space Marines who are the true brunt of the Chaos army. However, Cultists will only use their ranged weapons when they are set in a ranged stance. Ironically, they do fairly well when set like this, despite being melee specialists. Once infiltrated and upgraded with heavy weapons, Cultists can be effective at taking out enemy Listening Posts and other light enemy structures by themselves(but it takes a lot of time).

Good strategy is to use many (4-5) Cultist squads with GL on Tier 1 against some races. It's a good counter to mass SM, mass Reapers etc, because Cultists are very cheap.

Another common use of Cultist Squads is to have them engage more powerful ranged enemies such as TauFire Warriors in melee combat. This ties up the enemy so that they may not bring their best weaponry to bear on your other units.